DramatistDreamer

@DRW50 No problem. During 1986, so much was happening, events overlapped, preceded and followed on the heels of another-- I would've loved to see how it was all plotted out. As much as there are numerous episodes uploaded to You Tube, there are still several pivotal episodes that are still missing that would give a fuller picture to just how frenetic that year was. There were many fun scenes, dialogue and episodes, some of which are on You Tube, yet some are still missing. For this reason, I feel like even though everyone cites 1987 as the year for big things happening, probably because of the Lily reveal but to me 1986 has more big events jam-packed into that one year, it's easy to lose track of just how much went on that year.

That is wrong. A green card holder a.k.a 'legal resident' can be deported if serious crimes are committed. A naturalized U.S. citizen has all the rights of any other U.S. citizen. There have been reports of green card holders and a naturalized citizen being detained before being released. As terribly unpleasant that is, it is not the same as deportation. Only a major paperwork snafu can cause a U.S. citizen to get a deportation order, at which point that would be grounds for one hell of a lawsuit.

This is the episode that Shannon (who was clearly meant to be a red herring in this story) enters Lucinda's mansion wearing the green scarf that the bartender described of the woman (who supposedly met Lucinda) to Craig and Sierra. I guess that Iva, when she met with Lucinda at the bar, was also wearing some type of green scarf. The video and audio quality, as you can probably guess, is not that good so you may want to skip ahead to around 36:00 where the sequence begins.

If the group, called Rise and Resist had pulled a 'Mariah Carey' they certainly changed their tune when I heard one of their representatives speak this morning. The group's spokesperson said that although, it was not something the group planned (because of the physical risk), they thought cited Patricia for her bravery and called her an active member of the group. Ms. Okoumou has already been released on her own recognizance to appear in court next month with three misdemeanor charges. She has pled not guilty. @DRW50 By the way, Ms. Okoumou, who emigrated in 1994, is a naturalized U.S. citizen. Not sure where people are getting the idea that she can be deported without a major breach of the rule of law.

This is an interesting thread to peruse.

I must admit, that photograph of a stoic Therese Patricia Okoumou, in profile at the base of the Statue of Liberty had me choked up.

Now that I think about @DRW50I do recall a couple summers ago, watching a string of GL episodes from '84 and there were a few with poor picture. I guess I have managed to avoid those since then, although tbh, I don't watch classic GL as often as I do classic ATWT.

Someone just uploaded a bunch of Guiding Light episodes on You Tube and looking at the screencaps alone, I marvel at how consistently good the quality of videos uploaded of GL episodes are. I can't remember seeing any episodes with poor video quality. Same for EON videos uploaded to You Tube.

It's hard to gauge how much involvement based on You Tube episodes (many of which are still missing) but from what I've seen over the past year and a half, Shannon's involvement was very brief, more as a red herring. Shannon was actually contacting Lucinda because she wanted to sell back her shares of Walsh Enterprises (that had been gifted by Harriet) so that she could afford to hire a private detective to track down her long-lost husband, (who would turn out to be Duncan McKechnie) so she could get her marriage annulled or get a divorce.

I think Shannon was not so much a candidate for Lily's mother, but as a suspect for who was the person behind the mysterious phone calls that Lucinda had been getting. Back then, nobody knew why Lucinda was getting those phones calls but Craig suspected that it might have something to do with Martin Guest and Sierra only knew that the phone calls made Lucinda very agitated, so both Craig and Sierra (who was by this time married to Tonio) decided to share information and investigate this together. Once Iva walked into that bar off the Interstate and Lucinda, who'd been sitting there waiting looks up to see who it is, the audience becomes aware that it is actually Iva who was behind those mysterious phone calls to Lucinda (one of which Lucinda ran off the road and got into a near-fatal accident on the way to meet her). It was in the bar that Iva reveals that she's Lily's mother. At first, Lucinda is incredulous until Iva starts providing details, including the adoption broker who, it turns out met with Martin Guest. Craig and Sierra ended up suspecting Shannon as being behind the phone calls because of a weird call that Shannon made to the mansion and appeared to get frazzled when Sierra answered the phone. Also, when Craig found out the bar off the Interstate where Lucinda went (Lyla, who had found the address on a slip of paper that Lucinda accidentally dropped and left on her hospital room floor after her car crash, contacted Craig), he and Sierra went to talk to the bar owner who identify Lucinda in a picture that they showed him and then proceeded to give a dodgy description of the woman whom Lucinda met (he only mentioned figure, eyes and a green scarf), which Craig and Sierra assumed to be Shannon after she walked into Lucinda's mansion one day wearing a green scarf.

Sheffer's Barbara was very one-note. Very little you can do with that and still maintain a viable character. I have a very random question but perhaps someone here knows the answer: Does anyone know the name of the accompanist who used to play piano at the Mona Lisa in the '80s? I've always wondered who he was but I couldn't seem to locate him in the credits, which is odd because he appeared quite often back then,

Not according to Roger. He has stated in press that the RF logo belongs to him and he will be taking that to Uniqlo as soon as some issues are worked out. He sounded pretty adamant about that.

I almost don't want to ask but is this Bret Stephens? Whenever I see his name anywhere near a byline, I avoid it like the plague that it is. Worse than Brooks.

I'll fess up. I was the one that brought up Rick Ryan more than once over the years. Except for a few storylines about 20 years prior, Rick was almost a complete blank slate in soap terms and could've been eased back onto the canvas. In terms of Barbara, writing a vixen probably gives the writer a freer hand in writing story. Oakdale already had its heroine in Kim Hughes and then you had several women (Betsy, Frannie, Margo 2.0) that were various shades of ingenue/heroine so the show needed a vixen and Barbara Ryan with her history of either being trod on or left wanting by the men in her life, likely fit the bill. The clever thing about how Barbara was written by Marland was that, even in the midst of her most twisted scheme, she always had a justification for it (even if it only made sense in her mind) and she could never taste complete satisfaction with her actions, even when she appeared to get away with something. More often than not though, her schemes were usually revealed and often in the most embarrassing of ways. Unlike today when some characters' actions are completely villainous yet they never seem to pay the price. Also, Marland humanized Barbara even at her worst. You never doubted she loved her son Paul. Only once did she really show anything short of love and adoration for Kim and Bob (during the entire Sabrina scandal revelation) and even that was out of a sense of sorrow over her mother Jennifer. Barbara was written with enough complexity that even after the affair with Tonio while he was married to Sierra (who Barbara repeatedly sold clothes to) and messing with Tom and Margo and turning vengeful against Brian and Shannon, you still believed that Barbara was actually capable of falling completely in love with Hal Munson. That's some good writing.

Oh, Goutman had a huge impact actually, so I wasn't downplaying it at all. It was a large and lasting impact. He was there for at least a decade which was more than enough time to make a lasting impression and that, he did. I was pointing out that Calhoun was there for only a few years and it is still surprising how much of an impact he had for a relatively brief tenure (in soap years anyway). Part of what an EP does is not just cost cutting and budgets but in how the talent is managed. I take the sum total in when I made the distinction. I've worked with EPs who were strict but managed to treat everyone humanely. You can't always say yes, but even if you part ways with talent, at least let it be done on relatively amicable terms.

LOL. Yeah, the avatar is so 90s, that I loved it and couldn't resist. I loved that Debbie Simon wore glasses, at least for awhile. They had Sierra also return in '89 to reunite with Craig and then again in the mid 90s. Honestly, they should've kept this couple together and rather than messing with character trajectories, bring Rick Ryan to town in the early 2000s and have him create all the mischief that "Craig" ended up getting into in the show's last decade. I would've been cool if they had brought back both Finn and Scott to reprise their roles, even briefly, in the show's last few years. I would've loved to see the original actors interact. One of the things I loved about ATWT as a kid was how they used to bring Penny on sometimes for special occasions. It's too bad that ATWT stopped doing that by the end of the 90s. Had the show asked her to reprise her role, even for a brief story arc, if given the chance to work with Scott Bryce again, I doubt she'd turn them down but since they managed to fire Bryce, it doesn't seem that the show would've been interested in that approach. @John Thanks for posting that. I wish we could pin that somewhere so that it doesn't get lost in the run of the thread. The size of the impact that Calhoun had as EP seems much larger than his four years. As for Goutman, I'm convinced that when an EP is bad yet is kept on for so long, it is merely because they're the ones that will ultimately put the show "to bed".

Well, Finn has two kids, so that may have something to do with it. Also, the reality for men and women in Hollywood is quite different.

Eileen Higgings A.K.A. "La Gringa", a non-Hispanic and a Democrat won in a heavily Hispanic (i.e. Cuban-American) Miami-Dade district that had consistently voted Republican in the past. That is indeed...something.

So was I. Did ATWT ever ask that she return in the mid '00s? It seems that by then the show was pretty wedded to Mary Beth Evans in the role. It was me who mentioned that Scott Bryce has kept in touch with her. I read an interview (and posted it somewhere in this thread) that he often goes to L.A. (probably to audition and pilot season) and I believe Finn resides in So. Cal so he probably has caught up with her then. Bryce also mentioned that he's close with Tamara Tunie (he calls her his 'sister from another mother') and Brian Bloom (Dusty #1). Finn, like Lindsey Frost has turned to painting. As a matter of fact, Finn also has a studio. I found this on Instagram. starvingdilettante

I agree. Also, I think that, instead of flat-out leaving as others did, Larry Bryggman might have begun to invest himself more heavily in theater, film and other non-soap projects-perhaps because he saw where things were headed in the corporate scheme of things and decided that it was best to diversify his talent, even if that meant acquiescing to a slightly reduced role at ATWT. Being a wily veteran, he likely foresaw some of the changes afoot, which turned out to be a wise move considering the fallout that would eventually happen.

At the risk of sounding like a Marland apologist, I think John and Lucinda were supposed to be one of those break up to make up couples. They butted heads from the very beginning so it was never going to be continued bliss with them (or any soap couple, tbh). There has to be a mixture of conflict and harmony or there is no drama. I guess sometimes Marland went a bit heavy on the conflict One definite criticism I do have is although I think Marland wrote longing like very few could, he tended to keep his couples separated for very lengthy periods of time and sometimes it backfired, like when an actor left. Tom and Margo (GM & HBS), Sierra and Craig, John and Lucinda. None of those actor departures had anything to do with Marland. They were talent who wanted to spread their wings in other directions but it was unfortunate that because their characters had been written to be separated for so long, the viewers didn't get to enjoy them for as long as they could have. And it was problematic that sometimes the Snyders were interjected a bit too much, although in the long run, Emma and John, provided a good set up for the twist that would come when John and Lucinda eloped and Emma discovers this when Lucinda comes waltzing down those stairs and bodly stakes her claim on John. Sorry but that was good drama. If any Snyder was objectionable, it was the inserting of Ellie between Kirk and Iva, which ultimately, flopped and for good reason.

What's funny is that John and Lucinda had been 'teased' from as far back as 1984. I remember watching an episode uploaded to You Tube a few years ago where they went on a date at Diana's--it did not go well. Even the time when John was blackmailing Lucinda with the knowledge about Sierra over the board seat or over Lily's being adopted (he didn't know that Iva was the mother until after he and Lucinda married, I think), he and Lucinda always found ways to be in each other's orbit. Once, John even coerced Lucinda into having lunch with him in the hospital cafeteria, where unable to stomach the food, Lucinda just sat there and watched John eat, with a look of revulsion on her face. I think she even mentioned the cafeteria food being on par with the company, LOL.

When Craig ventured to Montega for the first time, he did not know that Sierra was Lucinda's daughter. By the time Craig was forced out of the country by hired goons (staged to protect Sierra who, unbeknownst to Craig was in hiding for her safety), he and Sierra had bonded considerably. I sincerely doubt that Craig would've had grief sex with Lucinda one night after they were told that Sierra had died if he knew the connection. Craig later learned the Sierra was Lucinda's daughter after he and Sierra had already been engaged to marry and he urged Lucinda to tell Sierra before John Dixon did (who wanted Sierra for himself and blackmailed Lucinda with the information in order for her to give up her board seat at Memorial Hospital, which John also wanted) . Of course, later on John, to spite both Craig and Lucinda told Sierra the secret that Lucinda had been hiding while also revealing that Craig discovered it and kept it from her as well. Sierra wanted Tonio to walk her down the aisle when she and Craig were supposed to marry and asked Craig if it would be alright. Craig reluctantly agreed. Tonio had supposedly fled during the revolution (they were always talking about the junta, a term I had yet to understand the meaning of) and was in Miami in business school (or something) at that time. I distinctly remember a scene where he mentioned Lucinda being a guest speaker at the business executive program he was involved in.